


End Times

by bresby



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:40:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23880211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bresby/pseuds/bresby
Summary: I’ve seen a couple of discussions floating around that the End must be doing pretty poorly in the fearpocalypse. After all, what does it have to eat if nobody is dying? Here is how the End can still be terrifying.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	End Times

**Author's Note:**

> This is a hypothetical End fearscape modeled after the format of the past few episodes. It was sparked by various discussions I've seen around the net about how the End must be losing out in the current apocalypse, and I was trying to find a way to make it still horrifying.
> 
> Content warnings for body horror, alcohol, and religious themes. Please let me know if you think anything else should be mentioned here.

There is a city on the edge of the end of the world, and its inhabitants know beyond a shadow of a doubt, they are the lucky ones. They are alive.

One night, they looked to the sky and saw the end of all they knew. They watched and made desperate calls to every loved one not in the city. Not a single call was answered, and yet the inhabitants of this city survived, and eventually, life went on.

These people exist. They breathe and cry and do laundry and hug their children close. On rare occasions, they even laugh. And every night, as they drift off to sleep, they dream of what nightmare awaits them beyond the grave.

Once, Matt Barrows had been your average psychic, offering meagre comfort to the masses for financial gain. “Yes, I see your mother. She’s with your childhood dog, and is that someone whose name started with an ‘M’? What was that inside joke you had?” He offered happy visions of eternal bliss, and told himself that though he knew it to be a lie, he was still doing some good. After all, he was letting suffering souls sleep at night, and it wasn’t like they would ever know the difference.

Since the event, his words flow out unbidden, uncontrolled. For the first time in his life, he knows that he is telling the absolute truth.

“Your brother Carlos is lost. He has been travelling a maze for what feels like centuries, and for each wrong turn, he is punished by the loss of another fingernail. They never regrow. He should have run out of nails long ago. He has not.”

“Your wife is dead and buried, but she is awake. She is aware of every cell in her body breaking down and putrefying, of the maggots making a home in her abdomen. She is aware of the crushing weight of the dirt on top of her coffin and the stench of her own decomposition. You buried her in the dress she wore to your 20th anniversary party. She always hated that dress, said the lace made her skin itch. It still itches, all the way down to her soon to be exposed bones. She can never scratch it away.”

“After your daughter died, the paramedics said she likely died of smoke inhalation long before the flames reached her. They said she didn’t suffer. They lied. She was awake, and screaming for you. You know how painful even a little burn is, but they say more serious burns don’t hurt at all. Yet you know, deep down, that this was no ordinary fire, and that these burns did not work like ordinary burns. It was the worst experience of her short life, and her death did not end it. Where she rests for eternity, the flames will never stop.”

Matt Barrows is more popular than ever.. People flock to him. Every show leaves audiences sobbing and clinging to each other. He concludes every show by saying, “We are alive. We are the lucky ones.” 

Rev. Hudson draws crowds with his message of rapture. He had turned to the faith after a near death experience, where he watched himself being crushed by infinite tumbling stones. He woke up knowing that death was pressing down on every person in the city, and that the walls were closing in from the second every baby was born. Like so many confronted with horrible truths, he turned to a fervent denial that deep down never quite worked. His near death experience was the cornerstone of his evangelism. He proclaimed to the world that he had escaped the grave, that he was living proof that they all still should have hope. For if the entire world had been turned upside down, who was to say that the certainty of death was certain?

He tells his desperate flock that they were still here because they had been chosen. Every one of them has been given one last chance to stay here eternally, in this little city guarded against the horrors of the world. They can avoid being cast out if only they prayed hard enough, if only they believed with every atom of their being. The lord was testing them, and the only way to escape perdition was to give yourself wholly to God. For if you were a beloved child of God, how could God let you go to the nightmares that await everyone after their death? And if you knew yourself to be a sinner, your fate should come as no surprise to you.

Mrs. Nguyen had been the oldest and most devout member of the church. She had been 105, and everyone looked to her as proof the sermons were true. Look, they said, this holy woman still lived. They could too, if they just believed -- just embodied enough virtue. Mrs. Nguyen died, of course. Before she died, she reported having dreams of an infinite sea of gray. Her whole life, she believed that through her actions and prayer, she could escape her fate. Finally, as her lungs failed her and each breath came at a greater cost than the last, she knew she would spend eternity contemplating an unending void, never able to escape from the fact that her every prayer had fallen on deaf ears in a universe that cared nothing for her. 

After her death, the church whispered of Mrs. Nguyen’s secret sins and her hubris, and they doubled their resolve. They would do better. They would find the right prayer, the right actions. And then, surely, they would not die. 

Across the city, others scorn the religious fools and take a more concrete approach. Dr. Dzbinski’s cryonics lab has never had so many rich customers. Those who can’t afford her services often stop her in the streets for a chance, any chance to have themselves preserved. She will calmly offer a business card with a link to a website that included a detailed description of how your body would be cooled to -130°C and placed in a secure preservation tank to await a day when your illness could be cured. She even offered a much more affordable plan wherein your brain could be removed from the rest of your body, reducing storage costs. 

At this point, most people look at her asking price and reconsider one of the city’s numerous religious organizations, which only mostly bleed you dry. Still, she has plenty of takers, all of whom she looks on with scorn. She couldn’t look through social media without finding a GoFundMe with some parent’s sob story of a child with cancer. They’d beg for donations to preserve their precious brat’s cerebrum. “His nightmares are getting worse” they’d say. “He says every IV line to him is now a web trapping him, and in the monitors he sees many-legged monsters. We think he is bound to an eternity of spiders, and he’s always hated spiders.” 

Dr. Dzbinski knows that nothing she does can avert her eventual end, and she plans to spend her numbered days living life to the fullest on the backs of fools. There will be no false hope of preservation for her. Instead, she spends her nights losing herself in the bottle, making death that much closer. The one thing she would never do was remain at work too late. After dark, it was hard to ignore the screaming from the cryo tanks. 

And so, life moves on in this little city. Its inhabitants look away from the sky as if that could shield them. Once upon a time, having certainty of existence after death would have been a comfort for many. Now, they would give anything for ignorance. They would give anything to not know they are experiencing an infinitely brief better before facing an eternity of worse. They ignore the dreams that whisper to them each night of their eternal destinations, and instead say that they had slept quite well, thank you when asked. Then, when it becomes all too much and they feel themselves becoming too paralyzed even start to enjoy their brief moments of life, they repeat the city’s mantra:

“We are still alive. We are the lucky ones.” 

And they wait.


End file.
